Maryrose Lyons blogging since 2003...

More Spam from the Irish?

August 12, 2008 at 2:12 pm

A previous post about the Golden Spiders being fined for spamming me generated a comment from John O’Neill, the owner of Backupanytime. Today he received an email from the owner of a new site, Mytown.ie, which he deems to be spam. He contacted the sender of the email and asked how he got his email address. The Mytown.ie guy had harvested the email off browseireland.com.

What Mytown.ie did is not illegal. They would only be in breach of the law if they ignored John’s request to remove his contact details from his database. Like what the mouldy spiders did to me. That shower kept emailing and telephoning even after I had asked to be removed from their lists. That is the real reason why they were fined for spamming.

I kind of feel sorry for Mytown.ie. It obviously took a lot of time and effort to do what they did, not to mention the monotony of harvesting all those email addresses. And I don’t think they’ll get that many responses. The email that I received was an elaborately written, too long, piece of marketing speak that went straight to the trash. They obviously just don’t know how to communicate online.

Here’s a link to a good post by Richard Hearne in which he meticulously breaks down what someone has done right in attracting his attention. Read the comments too for more info.

If you’re reading this Mr Mytown.ie – you can make a mistake once, just don’t do it twice. Oh, and good luck with your business.

Posted in Blogging | 2 Comments

Comments (2 responses)

john oneill @ August 13th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
You are right. Once is a mistake.
He didn’t do it just once.
The date on the email to us is not the same as that on the one browseireland received. (They forwarded a copy to us)
eire-webdesign.ie say they received it more than once.
Given that this discussion started yesterday, we may see many more examples to different people and from different dates.

John
http://backupanytime.com/blog/?p=122
Roger @ August 13th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
Just to clarify – he did not, nor could not, harvest the email from our site. He may have followed a link on our site – or could have gotten a bot to follow all the links from our site.